Every Day I Look at the World from My Window

Oh, my goodness. There's not much better than this song, which I've been listening to daily since I heard it two weeks ago.



But does anyone else think the primary guitar chords and melody sound like the verse in "Laughter in the Rain" by Neil Sedaka? I mean, I admit it: that is the first thing I thought when I first heard "Waterloo Sunset"--which was, I admit, two weeks ago. Although maybe it grazed my ears before when I wasn't paying attention. To me, the Kinks were always the smart old guys playing New Wave with "Back Where You Started" or "Come Dancing," which I also connected somehow with Tracey Ullman. Her "They Don't Know" was a bouffant-haired throwback in a similar way that "Come Dancing" echoed a gentler, poppy era, but Ray Davies' nostalgic return to his childhood is actually a bittersweet ode: the sister, eighteen years his senior, who "always did" come dancing at the local Palais suffered at the hands of an abusive husband and collapsed and died--no shit--while dancing.

Where was I? Oh, and "Lola."

Anyway: I really need to pay more attention to what I am hearing. That's where the good stuff is -- whether it's a seminal Kinks record I didn't know about and that I'm now also playing non-stop, or a transcendent song's similarity to subsequent schmaltz. Or, in other words, a boundlessly pleasurable discovery versus an ironic footnote to my parents' stereo turntable circa 1975. 

And by the way, it seems like when I find a heretofore unknown or long-ago gem of a song lately, I also stumble across a cover of it by Elliott Smith.

More on that later. I don't want to wander...